How Smartphones Match Up
A buddy of mine was asking me whether he should get an iPhone or BlackBerry or what (he’s coming from an old-school clamshell). I responded with this (which I found kind of amusing after I wrote it).
The iPhone is great if you want an iPod + internet/game device that’s decent for emailing/calling.
The BlackBerry Bold is great if you want an email device that’s decent for internet (I don’t know about calling).
The Google phone (G1) is for people who want to make a statement by not getting an iPhone.
The BlackBerry Pearl is a pretty good phone and decent email device (probably equal or better than iPhone).
Now I’ve only had two of these four devices (iPhone + Pearl), but I think the other descriptions are pretty accurate.
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Yeah, or the G1 is for people who don’t feel like paying an ETF to T-Mo.
Interesting the players that don’t even come up in conversation any more, particularly Palm. Being a former Palm devotee, this is especially apparent. I now go with Blackberry Pearl because it’s a reliable workhorse that, as you underscored, does voice and email very well. It performs Gmail and Google Maps, and has a million other apps, like Twitterberry. You can drop it and it probably won’t break. If it does break, it’s far easier and cheaper to replace than almost anything else. iPhone is awesome, but it’s a pretty piece of jewelry. Not appropriate for road-warrior usage. It’s also not good if you have kids — my two-year-old cracked the screen on one.
ah, the g1, that spiteful little open source phone from those upstarts at google. bought only by jealous fools, too poor to buy a first-run iphone and their way out of their contract with tmobile, suckered into a purchase and left with nothing to show for it but the ‘open source’ banner, which looks like a hanky on a stick.